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Amazon AWS Takes Down Netflix On Christmas Eve

For the third time this year, problems with Amazon’s AWS in Northern Virginia has knocked several websites and services offline, including Netflix. According to AWS’ Service Health Dashboard, problems began at 1:50 PM PST, and as of 5:49 PM, the company is continuing ”to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. Traffic for some ELBs are currently experiencing significant levels of traffic loss.”

Netflix has confirmed they are being affected by these issues, acknowledging this outage couldn’t happen at a worse time as families and friends are gathered together – and likely getting bored. Via Twitter, Netflix said “We’re sorry for the Christmas Eve outage. Terrible timing! Engineers are working on it now. Stay tuned to @Netflixhelps for updates.” Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockroft also said that this is only affecting only certain devices, though many users have reported gaming consoles and connected TVs have gone offline.

As of 6:45 PST, Netflix is still down, and AWS has not resolved the problems in the US-EAST-1 Region.

Update: As of 8:46 PM PST, AWS and Netflix are still experiencing issues. According to the AWS Service Health Dashboard, “We continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. The issues are affecting both existing and newly created ELBs.” Netflix reports, via Twitter, “we’re working on it.”

Update #2: As of 10:20 PM PST, AWS reports via the Service Health Dashboard, “We continue to work on resolving issues with the Elastic Load Balancing Service in the US-EAST-1 region. The issues are affecting both existing and newly created ELBs. While we are in the process of recovering the service, API calls for creating, modifying, or deleting ELBs will be disabled. We expect to restore full API service once the issues are resolved. We apologize for the impact of these issues on our customers.”

Additionally, Netflix has told customers they do not know when the issues will be resolved.

Update #3: Finally, at 8:45 a.m. PST on 12/25, everything is back up and running. Netflix tweeted, “Special thanks to our awesome members for being patient. We’re back to normal streaming levels. We hope everyone has a great holiday.”

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yeah well I have win 7 too and it would work for a minute then not work. If I only had one type of device I wouldn’t have made a comment like that. I have several DIFFERENT types and none were working.

This is a surprise why? The cloud is a lie. Shame on NetFlix for putting all of their eggs in someone else’s (unreliable) basket. They’re absolutely large enough to in-house their streaming infrastructure and effectively leverage economies of scale. Outsourcing to Amazon AWS, who must also be making money as the IT middle-man, means that a compromise is being made somewhere. In this case, it’s made at the expense of service reliability. Low end, unreliable hardware, mid-grade colo facilities, overworked and understaffed tech staff, etc. That shouldn’t matter though, right? This whole thing is “elastic” and regardless, the NetFlix devs have architected a fault tolerant application layer that can seamlessly fail over to other available resources? Clearly that isn’t the case. Cloud fail.